Introduction: The social reproductive question of land contestations in Africa
本文探讨新冠疫情下非洲农业社会中土地作为社会再生产基础的重要性，分析土地争夺与法律改革如何与农民、工人等群体的生存需求相关联，适合关注土地政治、发展经济学和性别研究的读者。
The contemporary period of a raging global pandemic has reasserted the significance of land and landed resources as the basis for social reproduction in agrarian societies. Due to coronavirus disease 2019, millions of poor and working-class households everywhere and especially in the Third World are faced with the question of survival: that is, how to meet their minimum daily consumption needs in the absence of adequate state support and wages. This question, regarding the basis of social reproduction, finds a varying range of responses in different social and political contexts. In the agrarian south, land attains significance not merely as a productive resource but primarily as the basis for the reproduction of working people, including the peasantry, petty commodity producers, and wage labourers, for whom the state and market are insufficient providers under capitalism. Land relations in Africa and the contestations which accompany them and precipitate reforms of law and tenure therefore need to be understood concretely in relation also to social reproduction, for which land plays a central function in agrarian societies. This introduction adopts such a lens in relation to the land contestations that this issue highlights in various Africa countries, asking how a feminist agrarian critique concerned with the social reproductive basis of land would respond to the thematic concerns that include legal formalism, communal tenure, rural transformation and land dispossession. This chapter thus is primarily interested in the questions raised through land claims and contestations, which highlight the social reproductive basis of land in the global south.